October 8, 2011

Robert Majzel's 85 project consists of eighty-five poems, each containing exactly eighty-five characters. Extant (consecrated) poems from the Jewish and Chinese traditions are reduced to eighty-five letters in English. The letters, all of identical size and font, lower case, and equidistant from each other, are not grouped into words. As a result, letters become material, plastic and pictorial.

Each eighty-five letter text is flanked by two backward nunim, the Hebrew letter n. In the Chinese series, the original Chinese poem is sealed in a box below or beside the eighty-five letters. The Hebrew and Chinese characters are part of the picture. The Tang dynasty series takes on the appearance of forbidding stelae; the Bada Shanren series resembles freewheeling colophons.

A hidden agenda by Chitralekha Basu

August 8, 2011

Click here to read an article on the 85 project published in US edition of China Daily in June 2009. The photo to the left is from a presentation on the 85's given by Robert Majzels and Claire Huot in Chengdu, Sichuan in 2009 at the White Night club.